One tip for increasing the number of potential viewers to your eBay listing is to use the 10-day listing option instead of the default 7, and then start your auction on a Thursday. Why? Doing so gives you two full weekends of visibility, when traffic is the highest.

The problem with eBay is that they pretty much require sellers to use PayPal (owned by eBay) for payment, thereby double-dipping on every transaction.

Point of information: I read elsewhere a comment from an auction seller who used a – gasp – different auction site to sell stuff, and then when she accepted PayPal payments on the other site, had her eBay seller account indefinitely suspended (she can still buy on eBay but can’t sell).

you bring up an excellent point. Ebay is mostly useless due to the proliferation of “stores” listing/selling the same shitty products over and over again. Since when did Ebay become a drop-ship service?

They need to make the cost of listing a Buy It Now item that doesn’t sell, much higher. Perhaps a hefty percentage of the BIN price. Make BIN free, but if it doesn’t sell, Ebay charges seller 30% of the BIN price. Then maybe Ebay would be useful again…

yeah, i don’t think they charge a fee (aside from the insertion fees) for the fixed-price “auctions” that don’t sell. maybe they should create a separate relisting fee for these types of listings & waive the fee if the seller chooses to go from a “buy it now”-type auction to a true auction.

it’ll never happen though – those insertion fees are a gold mine for ebay & i think they’re perfectly happy to re-insert them a thousand times if the seller desires.

I would say if you’re selling something of which there are a lot of other auctions already listed, use a much shorter auction period (ie, 3 days.) When there are a ton of results people will start to bid up the ones that end the soonest. If you’re looking to buy a used iPhone, you’re not going to go back in the search results more than a couple pages if there’s something with a good price that could be yours tomorrow. But I imagine if you have a more unusual item where there aren’t really many options, using the longest period would be best.

In my experience of 9 years of selling on ebay I can state for a fact that ending an auction on Sunday is incredibly stupid. For me auctions that end on Sunday have gone for 30-50% less than the average selling price of comparable items. There are just fewer people online on Sundays because so many do their grocery shopping, homework, etc on Sundays. And lets not forget church and church related activities.

Then you run the risk of not being able to bid later due to a temp outage, of which there have been many lately. eBay seems to be intermittently out for a few minutes at a time – esp when traffic is highest of course – and I’ve learned to bid early to avoid the heartbreak of not being able to get in that last minute snipe.

I’ve found a category where I know more than most sellers about the items they’re selling (or the sellers are just lazy in their unhelpful descriptions), and find some very good deals that way.

I’ve used this several times and it works. You also need to set your auction to end on Sunday evening around 9 or 10 pm EST so there will be people up on both coasts bidding when it ends. I sold a cell phone and a few iPods this way and got about 15-20% more than comparable items at different times. I also never put a reserve on the item and if it is something small, offer free shipping (you’ll make it back by people bidding higher on your item).

I always did free shipping for mine, and just started the auction higher. Rational consumers think about the whole cost of an item (my item for $10 with free shipping costs less than your item for $8 with $3 shipping). I didn’t want irrational people buying my stuff – if you can’t realize that $11 is greater than $10, I don’t want to have do deal with you having other issues.

Depends on what you’re selling. Used computers sell considerably higher on eBay than on Craigslist. I think eBay’s feedback system and PayPal recourse give bidders more confidence than you get buying from an anon seller on CL.

Sometimes, but not if there’s no local market for what you have. I have sold a few collectible items on eBay and they got bid up by buyers all over the country – for a final purchase price that was way higher than I ever would have thought to ask for if I were trying to do a straight sale.

Not everything sells of Craigslist if you don’t have a local market for it. ebay gives you a much bigger market to sell in. I use both and neither is perfect.

I’ve had numerous instances on CL where someone says that they want the item and will pick-up at a certain time and then never show-up–it ends up being a huge waste of time for me.

On ebay, if someone bids on your item, chances are it will be sold–provided it’s a reliable buyer. If it doesn’t sell, you can re-list easily. CL is not easy for re-listing item, you have to pretty much re-post the ad.

It entirely depends on who you are selling to. I am an underpaid 9-5 desk worker. I shop for work clothing on ebay while at work, and am much more likely to bid on something that ends within that timeframe. I cannot be bothered with staring at a computer screen on a Sunday night.